No Great Mischief (16 page)

“You,” said Grandpa, “go right upstairs to bed.” He said it with an authority he did not often show, and I was reminded of the time he had separated the red-haired Alexander MacDonald
and myself and held us firmly at arm’s length while our small indignant feet kicked at the air. Calum looked at him in amazement and I was struck by the fact that not many people in recent years had told him what to do. Perhaps not since the death of my parents had he been the child who hears and accepts the authority of others, perhaps with resentment but not unmixed with a certain sense of relief and complex gratitude. His feet sounded on the stairway above us and we could hear him falling heavily upon the bed.

“The rest of us,” said Grandpa, “will go outside.”

There were probably thirty or forty of us standing on the lawn outside of Grandpa’s house looking at the three police cruisers with their flashing roof lights and the six officers standing nervously before them. The
Calum Ruadh
dogs cocked their ears and moved erratically through the crowd, as if sensing a great event was about to unfold within their lives.

“We’ve come for MacDonald,” said the officer in charge. There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd and various shouts of “Right here.” “Over here.” All of the officers were from outside the local area and it probably had not entered their minds that almost all of us were named MacDonald. Nobody moved except for the shuffling of feet. The red roof lights revolved in the afternoon sun and even the dogs were temporarily quiet.

Then the door banged and Grandma came out, drying her hands on her apron.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, moving through the crowd that parted before her like the water in front of a boat’s prow.

“This family has suffered a death,” she said to the officer, “and we would appreciate it if you would leave us alone during our period of mourning.”

The officer took off his hat as she spoke to him and then withdrew a few steps and beckoned his men around him. After a brief conversation he nodded to Grandma and then all of them got into their cars and drove away, turning off their revolving lights as they departed. Everyone was relieved, although we all stood rooted to our spots for a few seconds. Then the dogs began to stir and romp and we all went forward into a life of movement.

The wake of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald began the next day at noon. His body was transferred by the undertaker from the plastic bag to the casket of oak which was set upon its trestles. The casket was closed because he was no longer recognizable to those who once knew and loved him. Instead his picture was placed upon the casket’s surface, the picture taken at his high-school graduation. His red hair was carefully combed and his dark eyes looked hopefully into the camera. There was a boutonnière in his lapel. Beside the picture there was a small stone chip from the original
Calum Ruadh
boulder. About the casket were the ferns and rushes from the
Calum Ruadh
land. It was still too early for the summer roses, the pink and blue lupins, the yellow buttercups or the purple irises with their splashed white centres. Still too early for the delicate pink morning glories growing from their tendrils among the rocks beside the sea. Growing low and close among the rocks and seeming to derive their sustenance from an invisible source, yet quick to die if plucked and removed.

On the third day and just before the funeral procession began, a letter came from the red-haired Alexander Macdonald addressed to his parents. It had been mailed on the morning of his death, before he had gone to work his final shift. It did not contain a great deal of information, only general comments about how well they were getting along and a cheque for two hundred and forty-five dollars. Both of his parents burst into tears, as if it were, somehow, the final straw. But then they embraced one another and composed themselves and went forth to what they saw as their immediate responsibilities.

On the day that we had fought as children, I remembered, his father seemed to have come to borrow money from Grandpa and Grandma. And I remembered how I had thought that the world had seemed unfair to me in terms of who had fathers and who did not. And that it had seemed unfair to him as well. Fathers helping sons and sons helping fathers in the mysteries of ability and time.

The funeral procession to the white country church stretched out for over a mile and the
RCMP
cruisers with their flashing lights sealed off the access roads as we passed through. We looked straight ahead, as did the officers, and neither of us acknowledged the other.

The interior of the church was packed with people, with some standing outside on the steps. The piper and the violinist and the singers waited for their time of contribution.

My other grandfather, “the man who could be counted on to be always in control,” went to the lectern to give the first reading. He was meticulously dressed, with his gold watch-chain
stretched across his vest and his highly polished shoes glinting in the light. His neat red moustache was carefully trimmed and his fingernails immaculately clean.

He turned the pages of the Bible and began: “A reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans: ‘The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.’ ”

Then he stopped and seemed to reconsider, turning back towards the Old Testament. He began again: “A reading from the book of Wisdom: ‘The virtuous man, though he die before his time, will find rest. Length of days is not what makes age honourable, nor number of years the true measure of life; Understanding, this is man’s grey hairs.…’ ”

I had heard him read before, carefully selecting the texts to suit the occasion. Once, as a child, I had heard him read from the Book of Revelation. It was a description of the coming of the New Jerusalem and the attendant preparations and miraculous happenings. One line, above all others, had remained most forcefully in my mind. It was “And the sea gave up all the dead who were in it.”

After my grandfather had finished the reading, the service proceeded in accordance with our customs. The violinist played “Niel Gow’s Lament” and
“Mo Dhachaidh”
(“My Home”). And outside the church the piper played “Dark Island” before the coffin of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was lowered into the grave by the hands of the men who had worked with him underground.

After the funeral we went back to my grandparents’ home, and later in the afternoon a long-distance call came from Toronto. It was a person-to-person call for my oldest brother and it was from the management of Renco Development, in fact from the superintendent of operations, the man who had sent the shaft crew to Peru. When he began to speak, Calum held up his hand for silence and the hubbub of conversation was stilled. The man spoke very loudly, as if the volume of his voice might transcend the distance of a large half-continent, and those of us who sat within the room could hear him clearly.

“Look,” he urged, “I’m very sorry about what happened up north. Sorry about the death and sorry about the hassle. It was all a mistake. The management up there doesn’t know you people the way I do. They should have just let you go to the funeral. If anything like that ever happens again, phone me directly. Phone me right away. I understand. You people have been working for me for a long time.”

There was a silence.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Calum, “I’m still here.”

“Well,” he said. “Listen. We want you back.
I
want you back. There is no problem. Just say you’ll come.”

“I don’t know,” said my brother, casting his eyes about the room. He looked very tired and the thread-like scar stood out whitely on his lip. He moved his head with difficulty and held it at a slanted angle, indicating that his neck was still causing him pain. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we’ll just stay home for a while.”

“Listen,” said the insistent superintendent. “We’ll raise your bonus by one-third. I guarantee it. Haven’t I always kept my word to you people?”

“Oh, it’s not the money,” said Calum.

“Haven’t I always kept my word?” repeated the voice. “Haven’t I always kept my word?”

“Yes,” said my brother.

“Well, give me yours. Just tell me you’ll come with the same number of men. Give me a date. The end of the week? The beginning of next week? We’ll send cars to meet you at Sudbury. Give me your word, and I’ll know I can depend on you.”

As the superintendent spoke, my brother’s eyes made contact with the eyes of the others in the room. He raised his eyebrows in the form of a question as he held the receiver in his hand. And he seemed imperceptibly to nod his head even as his eyebrows asked the question.

As his eyes moved from face to face, his men nodded slightly.

“Are you still there?” asked the superintendent once more.

“Yes,” he said, “still here.”

“Well, just give me your word.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll come.”

“Great,” said the relieved superintendent. “I knew I could count on you. And with the same number of men?”

My brother looked at me and I, in turn, looked at the faces of my grandparents and at the parents of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. I nodded my head slightly.

“Yes,” he said into the telephone’s receiver. “With the same number of men. We’ll be there.”

That afternoon my brother took three loaves of bread and two boxes of sugar cubes and went down to the land beneath the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point. Past the house where he used to live and which was now even more worn by time and weather. Down to the rocky shore where the pilot whale had foundered and where some of the creosoted timbers of his skidway still remained. It was, as I said, in the time of spring graduations, when the summer had not yet come into its full splendour and the grass, though not lush, was new and green. He stood on the timbers of the skidway and on the boulders of the shore in the expensive shoes he had worn to the funeral, and he looked up towards the trees of the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point. It was a hot afternoon and only the forms of the horses could be seen standing in the trees to take shelter from the flies. But when he placed his fingers within his mouth and emitted the two sharp whistles, the response was immediate. There was motion among the trees and the horses, and she came galloping down towards the shore, sending the small rocks and flecks of turf flying before her eager hooves. “Ah, Christy” he said,
“m’eudail bheag
,” as she thrust her head into his chest. She had grown grey about the eyes and muzzle, and a slight film was beginning to appear in her left eye. All afternoon he lay on the warm grass offering her the bread and sugar cubes while she nuzzled his face and his twisted neck, placing her great hooves carefully about the outline of his body. Some of
the younger horses who had once been her colts looked on with something like amazement at the behaviour of their mother. He sang to her in Gaelic, perhaps as he had at the time of the great storm when we had needed her strength, and she had needed his faith and calming confidence in order to go on. All day they stayed together on the green grass, giving and taking to and from each other.

Before we left, my aunt gave me the gift she had purchased for her son. “Take this and
wear
it,” she said, passing me the shirt. “Don’t leave it in the box. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll do that. Thank you very much.”

When
we arrived in Sudbury it was late afternoon approaching evening and the cars from Renco Development were there to meet us as promised. We started out driving westward on Highway 17, past Whitefish, and McKerrow, and the road to Espanola. Past Webbwood and Massey and Spanish and Serpent River. Some ten years earlier my brothers had come to the area as young miners in the first heyday of the region’s uranium boom. The boom had turned into a glut and many of the prospective headframes had been abandoned. Now with the promise of a contract to deliver 52 million pounds to the Japanese over the next decade they were
back, rediscovering what they had already found. It was, as the man from Renco Development said, “all systems go.”